Names for the Sea, page 21
I postpone the trip. I find the idea of talking to someone about elves embarrassing, and I’m still scared of driving on the unsurfaced roads outside the city, but one day after Easter Pétur tells me that Þórunn will be available to see me at her summer house on Saturday. He e-mails me a map. It’s a long way, much further out of the city than I’ve been before, and half the roads are gravel tracks. It’s also rather near Eyjafjallajökull.
I drive out of the city. I couldn’t eat breakfast, and can feel my heart banging as I join the freeway. It takes me a while to work out what the problem is. It’s not the driving, not on a bright Saturday with the children safely at home. It’s the solitude. I haven’t driven anywhere alone since we left England and it feels somehow unsafe, as if, through impulse or mishap, I might drive off the map and not come back. An obese Range Rover roars up behind, and drives along so close that I can’t see the number plate in the rear-view mirror. There is an empty overtaking lane but Icelanders try to push you along before resorting to that. I can hear his engine. I follow Hulda Kristín’s advice: turn the radio up, ease off the accelerator and stop looking in the mirror. He can’t get any closer so there is little point in watching, and as we come up to the hill above Hveragerði I lose interest anyway. I can see the volcano. I’m up among the hilltops here, and can see out across the sea to the Westman Islands and far inland over the mountains towards the glacier. The sky is baby-blue, the kind of blue that dupes foreigners into leaving their hats at home, but over in the eastern quadrant there’s what looks at first like an odd cloudscape. But it’s too well-defined, its energy too obviously coming from below: grey cloud boiling up far into the sky and sweeping across the eastern horizon in a storm of what might, from here, be particularly dark rain blowing across the sea. It reminds me of the cooling towers and factories we used to pass in the Wirral when going to Wales, when I could see a certain beauty in the movement of smoke and chemical pollutants across the pale skies and grey waves of the Irish Sea. Route 1 winds down the mountainside into Hveragerði. I carry on and find myself beyond our known world.
I leave the main road. The birch scrub beside the road is still leafless, skeletal, and where there is grass it is dry and dead. But the sun gets high in the sky now, and colours glow in the land, red volcanic soil, brown twigs rising from hay-coloured sedge, patches of bright snow in the hollows and black rock etched onto the grass. Dark grey cliffs lean over the road, and all the time the volcano is steaming and seething in the mirror. I lost the classical music station in Hveragerði and I haven’t seen another vehicle since I turned off the tarmac road. I drive on, upwards, checking the map as I go. There’s a ‘Site of Interest’ round the next bend, a place associated with supernatural beings, so I pull off and get out. I climb the col to find a family of Italian tourists photographing each other in front of a volcanic crater lined with red earth like the silk inside a Victorian top hat, and full of still, black water. No wind ripples the surface, no insect lands, no fish rises. One of the Italians is scrambling down to that dark pool, from which it is clear that a spectral hand, or perhaps tentacle, will reach to pull him down. The Volvo is waiting – I see the point of Volvos now – and I scurry back to it.
Just as I’m beginning to listen to my anxiety about being lost – though I still have a mobile phone signal, and actually there are quite a lot of summer houses scattered over these hillsides – I come to the two giant golf-balls I was told to look out for. I turn down the dust track between them, the car wallowing in loose gravel, and right and then left (the boiling volcano switching from one wing-mirror to the other), and there it is: a wooden chalet with a wraparound verandah looking out over the lava field to Eyjafjallajökull. Þórunn comes to welcome me, a small woman in her sixties with dark blonde hair in a rough bob and oversized, plastic-rimmed glasses. She’s wearing a mid-calf length skirt and a cream sweater. Nothing about her speaks of the supernatural; you wouldn’t give her a second glance on a bus. Come in, she says. Did you have a good journey?
We go up the wooden steps and in through the glass-paned front door, and I am swamped by envy. This little house has bright windows all around, looking over stunted trees and lava towards the mountains. The main room has a kitchen area, a fridge-freezer and an array of knives, seats arranged around a low table where a laptop waits, a big television in the background. There are two smaller rooms, one of which is almost filled by a double bed draped in an intricate patchwork quilt. The other is darkened, with a sofa-bed pushed against the wall. There is a small bathroom by the front door. Birch trees grow around the verandah and boulders slouch comfortably among the hillocks outside. It’s a cross between Little House on the Prairie and A Room of One’s Own and as such it seems, briefly, to define everything I’ve ever wanted in life. I exclaim over it and Þórunn says, yes, she loves it here, when she comes here she can do whatever she likes, whenever she likes. When she arrives she likes to go to bed for a few hours, after the drive, and then if she is bright in the night, well, she can write and eat and go walking then. When she gets back onto ‘city time’, she knows it might be time to go home. People say she must find it lonely, but she’s never alone. I look out of the window and think about what I could write if I could come here alone for days at a time. Maybe we should buy a summer house, I think, and come back to Iceland every year. Maybe we should come here and listen to the wind and the birdsong, although I know that the children’s fighting would drown out all but the strongest Icelandic wind and that none of us could sustain much interest in birdsong. Unless elves do good childcare.
I ask what she meant when she said she is never alone.
‘Well, there are seven kinds of beings around here. We’re talking about hidden people or elves, but to me there’s a difference between them. They all look human, all have human form. But the elves are more fun, and colourful, and different sizes. The hidden people are more like the working class, very down-to-earth, just thinking about their livestock and how to get food, and they’re always wearing very simple clothes, no colours, just brown and grey and white. I want to tell you about the woman who is just out there by the table.’
Þórunn gestures, and I gaze at the space she’s pointing to. I can see my own reflection, out there under the tree, and I can see the table on the verandah, and the wind stirring the rowan trees, and the ash cloud rising into the blue sky.
‘She’s from the hidden people, and she lives in the lava field with her family. I used to go and visit her, but about three years ago she started to come and see me, just for a visit. And there are tree elves that I can see out there, small tree elves, and the flower elves, which are even smaller’ – Þórunn holds her hand about a foot above the coffee table – ‘but usually elves are very delicate creatures, with a very fine bone structure. Well, beings, not creatures. And they’re in the trees and flowers and in the rocks. Not exactly in, because when I’m looking at the hidden people I’m not seeing the world the way you would if you took a photo of it. Where they live here, it’s a golf course, but I’m seeing it the way it was before the golf course was built. I’ve seen them building their houses in the trees and rocks, especially when the young elves are starting their marriages. Well, their relationships – I’m not sure they do get married. Starting their families.’
I do not ask about elf sex.
‘All the elves are starting to show again now. All but three types are hidden all winter.’
I sip my coffee. ‘Where do they go in the winter?’
Þórunn shrugs, glances outside, as if there is someone listening. ‘I’m thinking maybe it’s that I don’t see them, maybe because of the light. Because – I saw a therapist once, I was worried that I am not normal, and he said that most people see only five per cent of what there is to see, but people like me, born this way, we can see from fifteen up to twenty-five per cent. But there is still seventy-five we cannot see. So I’ve been thinking I don’t see them in the winter, but I can still feel them very strongly on my skin. We know that dogs hear what we don’t.’
There are lots of legends, across the North Atlantic, about animals seeing beings invisible to most people, horses refusing to pass a murder site and dogs that run to the door when the master’s ghost comes calling. I’ve felt things on my skin too, usually in darkness, on stairs and in long passages. I don’t much want to believe in them.
‘And small children,’ I add, remembering that Max used to be able to hear bats.
‘And small children. I just love them. Up to about six years old, you can just see that they can see and hear everything, just by watching them and talking to them, not feeding them a line. It’s such a beautiful time. Because they really know everything, until we start trying to teach them. That’s when they forget. It’s very sad.’
Tobias’s current favourite game is rounding up imaginary spiders and chasing them out of the flat. Sometimes he opens the front door to check if there are any on the landing, once or twice he’s been woken by them in the night. Tobias’s spiders are about a foot high and it’s quite important to me that they don’t exist.
‘Wordsworth thought that,’ I say briskly, mostly to myself. ‘But children learn other things that they need. Reading and writing. So do you hear the elves and the hidden people as well as seeing them?’
She has the patient expression of people who try to explain to me how aeroplanes stay up. ‘I cannot hear them with my ears the way I can hear people that have left the earth, but I can communicate with them. Actually, I have been writing down old stories the elves have been telling me, about where the hidden people came from, and how long ago, and why. I don’t care if anybody believes it or not because I know what the elves are telling me. Although not all of the elves are psychic. From the family down there, there are only two beings that are psychic for the whole community. But I can communicate with different kinds of elves. Once, I was walking in the mountains in the winter, with four other people. I met three types of elves, first an old man and a woman – she said, “What do you want?” – and then a younger mother with a crying baby. I wanted some way of showing my companions that there was more life there than met the eye. So I asked this old man, this small old man, if he could do something to let my friends see that he really was there. And there was a pine tree, a Christmas tree, and lots of snow – you know how it is beautiful. And he reached down, took one of the branches, and shook it so the snow fell down. And I was so happy! Because sometimes I wonder if I’m just imagining things. But luckily, I have had proofs many times. The elves can get physical. When it’s about Mother Earth, then they have a bit more control.’
I thought elves could disrupt road-building and move things around people’s kitchens. I thought that was how we knew they were there. ‘So they don’t have any control over the built environment?’
Þórunn glances around her little house. ‘They wouldn’t disturb anything here. But when there are eruptions in the land, on the earth, then they can make a difference.’
The ash cloud behind her shoulder is bigger and darker than it was when I came, surging across the bright sky. There are farms round the other side of the mountain that will be uninhabitable for years to come, villages where the children have not set foot outside for weeks. In earlier centuries, there have been eruptions that have depopulated half the island.
‘The elves can control volcanic eruptions?’
Þórunn smiles, doesn’t look behind her because she knows what I’m thinking. ‘No. But they can have a little to say about it. If they would like to stop an eruption progressing, they could do it. Not like taking a tractor or anything like that.’ (I think she means that elvish interference with volcanoes is less mechanical than human control of machines, but maybe elves have form for tractor-theft.) ‘But they can make it difficult. I never have any trouble with them. I’m often asked to come and talk to them, when people are trying to build something and it’s not working. It’s always just a lack of communication.’
‘So you negotiate?’
‘Yes. There’s always a way of coming to an understanding. If people aren’t selfish.’
‘So the elves can stop people building houses?’
‘They can make it really difficult. And anyway, people will never be happy in a place where they’ve torn down the elves’ house. Sometimes it’s only to give the elves a week to move to a better place, or even sometimes it’s enough to move their house, if it’s a stone, to move it just a little bit. It’s all about talking to them.’
She’s an elf consultant, I think. And there are houses where people are unhappy, houses with presences you try not to think about. We moved into one when I was eleven, a house with too many doors in which you couldn’t hear what was happening in other rooms. It came with a complicated alarm system that didn’t make anyone feel better.
‘Can you give me some examples?’
‘Well, the most recent one is in Reykjavík. The people had built their house into the ground, because they wanted it to be as natural as possible. But no-one could sleep in the main bedroom and the little girls who lived there were unhappy, and people kept hearing things and sensing things. At first they thought it was ghosts, so they called me. But they’d taken land from a father and a young daughter, and he was angry because he didn’t have his home any more. So we agreed that the owners would put a big stone back in the corner of the bathroom, and they wouldn’t touch a huge rock in the garden. So the elf man and his little girl had a small corner in the house, and their main home in the garden. And then everyone was happy.’
A kind of elf reservation. ‘I’m surprised the elves were happy.’
Þórunn shrugs. ‘Well, they were forced to be. They’re more understanding than we are. They prefer to build away from us, but we’re always moving, and then what are they to do?’
In the human version of this tension over land rights, in Israel and Northern Ireland, for example, they usually resort to explosives.
‘So they’re always benign? Well-disposed?’
‘If they’re approached with goodwill. I’ve never in my sixty years come across a bad being. I’ve never seen any demons or bad elves. Not when I haven’t understood why they’re behaving like that. Usually it’s because something has been done to them.’
‘What about ghosts?’ The ghosts are what I’m really interested in. I know there are powerful Icelandic ghost stories but no-one will tell them to me. Even Pétur and Vilborg respond with courteous distaste. They are not nice, I’m told firmly, and I haven’t yet been here long enough to know how to get people to talk to a foreigner about things that aren’t nice.
Þórunn doesn’t want to tell me about ghosts either. ‘I don’t like the word ghosts. My guides have a word for people who have passed over in the last two hundred years. There’s always someone around but they’re not doing much, just watching over. They’re not very different from when they were alive, asking why you painted the wall a colour they don’t like. If there’s some event, a wedding or christening, they’re always very excited. But I’ve never seen a bad person who’s gone over. I’ve seen them frustrated – I was at a funeral for a young man, and he was there in the church by the coffin where they always stand, and usually one or two with them. He was very angry and he had to be taken away. He was young, and he was very drunk when he fell and wrecked his head, and he was angry. But usually when they are buried they go and say goodbye to their nearest and dearest. And that’s very interesting for me. Maybe a widow was being very brave, but when her husband comes and touches her shoulder, then she breaks down. And also I can see it with the children. And that’s what people don’t understand. They say, “Oh, it was when I heard this song, then I just broke down.” But that’s not the reason. It’s the final goodbye. Maybe I just don’t want to see anything bad. I love to go out here in the winter at night, just to have the complete darkness surround me. It has never even entered my mind that there could be anything to harm me out there.’
‘That sounds comforting,’ I say. I am trying to imagine Þórunn’s world.
‘It is comforting. And for me, it’s normal and I feel safe. People say they saw a big black shadow or they felt cold. Well, I feel people who have passed, and if they drowned or froze I can feel their cold. But it’s just part of life. Maybe because I was born that way.’
Þórunn has seen the hidden people all her life, played with them as a child. I turn my question around.
‘When did you realise that other people couldn’t see them?’
She laughs. ‘It’s very strange, but I was thirty-five years old. I was working in a bar, and there was a young man who often came there. And after he’d had three or four vodka tonics, another guy would come in and lean over him, nudging into him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but it was clearly, “Go on, have another, just a little one.” I knew this beautiful young man and he couldn’t handle his liquor. It went on for months, and one day I said to my boss, “I’m going to say something to that guy. He’s no friend to Siggi, getting him to drink so much.” And my boss said, “Sorry, which guy?” And I said, “Come on, the guy hanging over his shoulder.” And my boss said, “What do you mean? There’s no-one there.” So I just—’ Þórunn zips her mouth. ‘Some people do say that other beings drink through them, and it’s not exactly like that, but sometimes alcoholics who have passed over, they can see the aura of drinkers getting less protective. And even if the beings or the dead people can’t drink themselves they can enjoy the – the drunkenness. You know?’ She babbles in a deep, slurred voice. It’s not quite uncanny – any woman with a trained voice could probably do it – but it sounds male, drunk, and not like Þórunn.
